by John Niles
Sound
Transit Board Vice Chair Julia Patterson wrote an essay in summer 2013 on
the importance of public transit that has been widely published in community
newspapers distributed in South King County and on the Internet. For
example, this essay is available at
http://www.rentonreporter.com/opinion/221857741.html.
When I read this, I spotted a few places where PITF has a different interpretation of what's going on, which I will report on here.
First
of all, Councilmember Patterson notes, "Sound Transit provides regional
long distance services throughout King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties..."
But as measured by that agency's entire budget allocations,
only a fraction of its work now is long-distance services.
Actually, Sound Transit today is primarily a railroad construction
agency that is consuming billions of dollars enabling train service in
corridors that did, or could, provide perfectly adequate bus service. Even
in its service provision, Sound Transit directly contracts with King
County Metro for the drivers and maintenance of its bus routes in the
County and its Central Link Light Rail.
The bulk of Central Link
Light rail service over the next ten years will be carrying passengers
from point to point within a few miles of downtown Seattle. In the present
era we cannot yet call this billions of dollars in light rail investment
by Sound Transit followed by hundreds of millions in annual operating
expenses a "regional long distance service."
The taxpayers have
indeed voted for regional trains as of November 2008. Decades from now,
and after additional billions of dollars are consumed, there may be a
regional light rail system that reaches deep into all parts of the three
county region. However, Puget Sound Regional Council is forecasting that
this future network of trains will carry only half the people in 2040 that
Sound Transit predicts will be carried on trains in 2030.
But
that's a prediction that can't be validated until many years have passed.
For now, I think it's important to describe accurately what is
going on for the next few years.
South King County is now
planned very soon to be one of the first places in the world where new
express bus service (RapidRide A) runs along side new parallel light rail
service (Central Link), when the Angle Lake light rail station opens in
2016. More likely, and hopefully for cost saving, the plan will change so
that RapidRide A is truncated to have Angle Lake as a terminus where
everybody going north makes the switch from bus to train, or vice versa
going south.
In the meantime, King County Metro is screaming it's
so broke it needs millions of new tax dollars to avoid cutting 600,000
hours of service while Sound Transit is spending billions to build trains
along bus routes from the same taxpayer wallet.
Given Sound
Transit's vast treasury and Metro's now recovering tax revenues, I'm in
favor of holding the line on more King County Metro taxes as a signal to
squeeze more efficiency from the entire, sprawling Puget Sound regional
transit apparatus.
The region's multi-agency system of
back-scratching and self-congratulation has been tagged for overhaul twice
in recent memory, by The Regional Transportation Commission (RTC)
appointed by Governor Gregoire in 2006, and earlier by the Blue Ribbon
Commission on Transportation appointed by Governor Locke in 1999.
Final note -- I want to comment on the claim that "transit reduces
traffic congestion."
No serious transportation research has ever found that transit reduces traffic congestion in regions or corridors where cars are accommodated at the same time. Metro's "congestion reduction charge" on the license tab tax the King County Council authorized is an abuse of English language meaning.
Various
Sound Transit leaders serving along side Board Vice Chair Patterson have
explicitly stated that Sound Transit does not reduce traffic congestion.
For example the Coalition for Effective Transporation Alternatives quotes
the agency's CEO on this point at the top of its website
http://www.effectivetransportation.org.
What public transit urban
rail will do in the best case is let a commuter trade in a congested trip
in a car while sitting down for a shorter, crowded train ride standing up.
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Last modified: September 27, 2013